Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous LTE Networks

Abstract: Awareness of climate change and our environment is affecting the field of mobile communications. The challenge of reducing the carbon footprint and operating expenditures, while the demand for coverage and capacity is growing exponen-tially, is driving the trend of studying energy efficiency of mobile networks. Providing services in a resource efficient way have benefits both for the operator and the environment, which is why requirements on energy performance will be a part of the specifications of future 5G networks. In long term evolution (LTE) networks, indoor small cells are deployed inlarge volume to improve performance in areas with poor macro coverage or high traffic demand. This type of network topology, that consists of several types of access nodes, is called a heterogeneous network (HetNet). In this master thesis we study the energy efficiency of various HetNet deployments in a dense urban environment. The small cells deployments investigated are pico base stations and micro distributed antenna systems. Dense and sparse deployment strategies with varying transmit powers are compared. Furthermore, we investigate the potential for energy savings by setting the small cells into a low power sleep state under certain conditions. Both short sleep periods between transmissions, called discontineous transmission (DTX), and longer sleep cycles during periods of low activity is investigated.This thesis was carried out as a project at Ericsson Systems & Technology in Kista, Stockholm 2015. To be able to evaluate the energy consumption at network level, realistic models for the power consumption of various base station types had to be implemented into a static radio network simulator. Results show good performance of the considered HetNets but at a cost ofhigher power consumption than a macro only network. For example, a pico HetNet with twice the macro capacity consume 75% more energy over one day. However, results show that with DTX and sleep modes enabled, the daily energy consumption of the same HetNets is only 30% higher than the macro only network. Therefore, the main conclusion is that energy saving techniques will be of great importance for improving capacity without increasing network energyconsumption.